2.1

TiPb loves answering your emails, but we also love sharing our answers with the community in hopes that more people will benefit, and even better answers will present themselves (hey, that's why we have them forums!). Today's question comes from Brenden:

quick question - are you still hearing about widespread reception issues with the iPhone 3G? I bought one and took it back because of poor reception, but i'm considering getting one again if the reception issues are fixed ..

Since upgrading to iPhone firmware 2.1, from time to time my camera preview -- and the pictures themselves -- have taken to breaking apart and re-arranging themselves into something pretty much unusable (though likely to fetch a pretty penny at the snootier, more vacuous galleries, no doubt).

The above picture was of a plain surface, now broken into a patchwork of planes. Happens with faces, people, and just about everything. It's not happening regularly enough, however, that I'm close to considering the nu-cu-lar option -- full on restore.

Is it possible that web apps can return from the dead? It seems to me that the 2.0 firmware pretty much buried the poor web apps six feet under. Even if they are not used nearly as often since we have 3rd party apps along with the App store, it seems as if Apple are quietly tweaking the iPhone for them.

TiPb loves answering your emails, but we also love sharing our answers with the community in hopes that more people will benefit, and even better answers will present themselves (hey, that's why we have them forums!). Today's question comes from Brandon:

I think it was universally acknowledged that September was when Apple promised is background notifications for the iPhone 2.x. September has come and gone and I don't know about you guys but I still don't have background notifications on my iPhone. Would be nice if you guys posted something busting apple's 3@!!$ for missing the date and hoping we wouldn't notice. I think alot of people like myself bought iPhones with the promise of these notifications in mind.

As opposed to "push" style ActiveSynch, MobileMe, or Yahoo! iPhone mail, traditional POP or IMAP accounts, like Gmail or ISP mail, needs to "fetch", or check the server on a certain schedule to see if there are new messages.

Reader Mike wrote in pointing us to a thread on the Apple Discussion Forums about "fetch" email being broken with iPhone 2.1. I only fetch mail from Gmail, and Gmail IMAP is a strange and buggy implementation which gives me considerable problems beyond the iPhone, so I can't say whether anything is really broken or not in 2.1.

Today on the forums we have a couple of newly started threads that you should enjoy. There has been a lot of talk about jailbreaking lately with the new QuickPwn's released for both Mac and Windows. Have you given jailbreaking a try? Let us know in this thread.

About a month ago Dieter reported about a fairly large security flaw in firmware 2.0.2 that gave access to Safari, Email, and a frightening amount of personal data. Apple patched it in 2.1. Or did they?

This could be a flaw, or feature, but it turns out you still have the ability to make a phone call, to any number, while the iPhone is locked with a passcode. Wasn't the "emergency" call feature meant to call "emergency" numbers such as 911 only?

In the latest firmware, 2.1, Apple implemented a nice safety feature: the ability to have your iPhone erased if the wrong pass code is entered 10 times. It is a great feature if your phone is stolen or lost and you have vital information that should not be seen by anyone else.

I received the above picture from forum member cgov this morning. Seems as though he only gets 5 tries to unlock his phone before it gets erased compared to 10, which is supposed to be the standard.